


Your Corner of the World

by powercorruptionlies



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989)
Genre: Character Study, Grief/Mourning, Introspection, M/M, Monologue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-20
Updated: 2020-09-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26559040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/powercorruptionlies/pseuds/powercorruptionlies
Summary: Who is Todd Anderson?
Relationships: Todd Anderson/Neil Perry
Comments: 4
Kudos: 29





	Your Corner of the World

There is a corner of the world that Todd Anderson has carved out for himself. It is a crawl space, and it tapers off and narrows the further in to it you get, but that is just the thing: Todd can always fit, and nobody else should be able to venture further than himself. The crawl space is warm and close and terribly, terribly lonely, but there is a distinct lack of _eyes_ he gets outside of this space; so, in here he stays, his head in the sand, his father would tell him - and will tell him again, and again, and again.

Todd is alone in the house. It's late winter, deep into the withering, unbearable tendrils of bleak, sunless skies and nights with the longevity and impenetrability of a cockroach; it's late winter, and Neil has been gone for a year.

Todd has combed through each word in this sentence for as long as it has been true: Neil's been gone for a year. He picks apart every word, analyses them, categorises them by what sort of word they are, and seeks out their etymology. He hopes that this will, in some way, provide him with the deepest, most comprehensive understanding of this sentence, this statement of fact, and he will finally be able to detox himself, flushing the thought away, and moving on; but it doesn't work like that, and Todd is smart enough to know this, or he would be, if he had all of his mental faculties operating correctly, which he has been told in recent months (from professionals and non-professionals alike) that he does not. 

Recently, Todd has questions, and a lot of them. They're questions so deceptively simple in their phrasing that you can almost forget about the fact that they're entirely unanswerable, and boast some of the most daunting topics that people have mulled over for thousands and thousands of years, with no definitive answer. Todd knows that he will never reach a concrete answer, either, but this doesn't frustrate him. More than not, it thrills him, it thrills him that not everything has to come to an end, and not everything has a concrete finality. He likes knowing that some things can go on forever, like the question of God; the question of the afterlife; the question of what makes a good person; the definition of abstract concepts, like happiness, justice, courage, goodness, beauty; the question of our purpose; and, most of all, the question of who he is, his formal cause.

Todd has tried a plethora of ways of answering this. The meaning of his name (Anglo-Saxon in origin, meaning fox); his family history, discovered in the dead of night when he creeps down to the stuffy library on the first floor of his parents' grandiose house and delves into volumes and volumes of books with pages like onion skin, his ancestral history and immigration documents and etchings and corrupted film with simulacrums of his long-dead family members all confined within those leather-bound copies. None of the objective methods worked - this frustrates him, finally, because he doesn't want to turn to speculation, not this time. The subjectivity of his being, his perception, is vast, and extends far beyond his means of figuring it out; so, he narrows the candidacy down to one person: himself.

He asks himself questions in his head, all throughout the day. Which of these books do you prefer? Which room of the house do you like best? What's your favourite season? They all feel juvenile and uncomfortable, like icebreaker questions to which you can't give an honest answer. And, sometimes, Todd doesn't give himself an honest answer. He'll play games with his mind, deceive himself, try to derail his experiment, and for what? To test his own resilience? To see if he really is insane, as his father says? Whatever the reason, he grows to hate himself even more for this puerile activity, in how pointless and time-consuming it is, until he realises that the things he dislikes about himself, the parts that he rejects so vehemently, are maybe the closest things to his truth as he will ever come. 

So, who is he? He is the second child of his parents, born from his mother a week too early and was never allowed to forget the inconvenience that caused them; he is, by nature, an unpleasant, unwelcome, surprise; he is the boy who shrinks away from everything that Jeffrey always tackled head on - extra credit, bullies, summer school, talking to ~~boys~~ girls; he is his father's greatest shame. 

He is the new kid at Welton; he is shy; he is Neil Perry's roommate; he is bad at trig, and calculus, and Latin; he is, reluctantly, reticently, a Dead Poet; he is the boy that Mr. Keating made bare his soul to the class; he is the friend of Neil, and Charlie, Knox, Meeks, Pitts; he is kind to Richard Cameron, because he sees himself in everything the light reflects back to him, but better, more deserving.

He is someone who could've done more to help Neil; he is now a burden to his friends; he is now a greater burden, a greater shame, to his parents; he is now mute; he no longer writes poetry; he burns what he has written in the sink, everything addressed to Neil, all the things that were once _t_ _his will bes_ are now great, crushing _what if_ _s_?; he goes on walks at midnight and selfishly hopes he fades out along the way. 

But, inevitably, there are other versions of Todd, too. His parents' version, his brother's version, his friends', his teachers', strangers'. Todd doesn't know these ones, and even if he did, he'd smile his best smile and it would dissolve quickly into the cold flesh around his mouth and he'd never, ever, believe it. 

To his parents, he is their son; someone they wish would try harder, if only for himself; someone who needs to understand tough love better; somebody they, ultimately, gave up on. 

To his brother, he is someone he wishes he could get through to; someone he wishes would accept his love; someone who would see that it isn't his fault their parents' attention is so unfairly divided; someone enigmatic; someone with potential he wants him so badly to realise; someone he wants to hold and love and to say, from experience, that there is little he could've done for Neil, because: who is Jeffrey Anderson? Jeffrey Anderson is Neil Perry, but older - not wiser - but more tired, and with less boldness and rashness, and, as Jeff realises, with not half as much perception of the world as Neil had. 

To his friends, he is a Dead Poet; the best poet, the greatest poet of his age, Homer's age, Byron's age, Whitman's age, and all the ages to come; he is gentle, he is kind; there is a wealth of love, like a sloping pile of King's gold, sequestered away in a castle, behind his lofty, precarious walls; he is courageous; he is somebody they are lucky to have known, even if now, he is becoming unknowable again.

To Keating, he is a poet like any other; self-effacing; thoughtful; competent; clever; somebody he is glad that Neil Perry found to love, and somebody who he hopes, and prays, and pleads knows how much love he has found himself.

To strangers, he is the one who smiles at them; the one who holds open doors; the one they see dropping coins into the empty coffee cups of homeless people; the one who tips nicely; the one who can't manage a sentence at the off-licence or at a restaurant, but gets what he wants, anyway; the one they saw running through the snow, snot-nosed, crying, and desperate; somebody they wish they could talk to, and befriend. 

Wait - there's one more. One more that, if impressed upon enough times, Todd would believe, and believe so wholeheartedly he might just become this version of himself; but, of course, he had already metamorphosed into this boy when he was conceived in this mind. Existing at the end, the very lithest tendril of the crawl space, where it is warmest, is the cure to the loneliness that threads itself throughout the hole and explodes into the world of matter. It sits down there in an unreachable place like a coin flung to the bottom of a well with a wish attached to it, the only place in Todd's corner of the world that he cannot reach - this makes him angry, and then it makes him upset, and then it makes him numb. He cannot reach it, because it was discovered and made by another architect, one with more delicate hands and a more precise intent. The architect never intended to make it inaccessible to Todd, and it is still obtainable, whenever Todd is ready. It will wait; it will always, always wait. 

To Neil Perry, Todd is the truth. Todd is the boy who's hair catches the violently orange sunrise over the tops of the dying trees on Welton's fields, shimmering at the desk in the window as he works away in the waning hours between pure night and luminous day. Todd is the boy who he wishes had a voice, because he knows, he just _knows_ , that if Todd were to open his mouth, the purest essence of everything good and right would come spilling out, and order in the world would be restored, because Todd, inadvertently, would teach the billions of people in the farthest reaches of the world how to love and how to be and how to talk and how to nurture their greatest, most unique talents, because that is what Todd Anderson did for Neil, and he will never forget that. He is the boy who helps him run lines for the play. He is the boy that jumped on his back in pure ecstasy after the soccer game with Keating, and the boy he lay on the ground with in the dewy grass, the morning frost had only just melted into the still-verdant blades, for a moment too long, staring at him, and smiling. He is the boy, the only boy, who has seen him cry. He is the boy, the only boy, who knows how he copes with his father's pressure. He is the boy, the only boy, who knows him truthfully, the only person who knows the truest, most objective form of Neil Perry, and this way, it will remain. He is the boy who plants ideas and concepts and perceptions like seasonal trees, and they grow big, and strong, and sturdy, and when the leaves moult and shed in the coldest months, they smell sweet as they rot and fertilise the ground, and help birds build their nests, and bring a splash of joy to people who go walking by and collect the carmine leaves with ochre veins careening through them like lightning bolts immortalised in nature. He is the boy who bruises easily, like fruit, in more ways than one, and knows it, and jokes about it, though Neil wishes he wouldn't. He is the boy who gets so anxious he cries and feels nauseated, and the boy who tells Neil he is the only person who hasn't shouted at him for feeling so fully and so deeply he throws up, and the only person who has helped him clean up afterwards. He is the boy with an extensive, almost bizarre and eclectic range of knowledge: Roman army formations, Eastern philosophy, the construction of St. Petersburg, the Age of Enlightenment, number theory, how alcohol is made, deformations in plants. Equally, he is the boy who thinks he knows nothing, is good at nothing, and will never amount to anything. He is the only boy that Neil has heard this from and thought: _wrong - on all accounts, wrong -_ because anybody can fail and make a mess of their life, but Todd would never; Todd could never be _nothing_. He is the first and only boy he has ever loved, and the last, and that is oh-so fine with Neil, because he is also the only boy who Neil could've ever dreamed of spending eternity with, should that have ever been the case. He is the boy who Neil thought about as he pulled the trigger. He is the boy who Neil thought about in his final moments of consciousness when the pain was so immense and then it all stopped. Todd Anderson is the truth, and Todd Anderson is a mirror, and Todd Anderson is everybody, and everything.

Todd may never know this. He likely won't; but, if you say something, and nobody is there to have heard it, you still said it, and that applies to the variegated versions of Todd Anderson.

So, he asks himself again: Who is Todd Anderson? He can't think of anything new to add to the list. And then, he thinks, fleetingly: I am me. He does not dwell on this, and he goes outside for another walk. It's cold, and it's snowing, but the snow isn't as deep as it had been that day. Todd stands outside his front door, looking around the world, at the steely-blue sky with no clouds, and the blackbirds flying south in a V-formation. One bird does not fly within the V, but flies alongside the rest, and Todd wonders if that bird is panicking to be so far out of the line, or whether he is comfortable, flying his own way. 

_I think he's happy like that, don't you?_

The voice in his head isn't his own, but it's familiar - well, he know's that it's _his_ thought, only attached loosely to the person who taught him to think that way. 

'I think he is,' Todd says aloud, his breath visible in swirls of white, dissipating steam in front of him. 

He tightens his scarf, and walks down the street.


End file.
